Marie-Ange Brayer, Frac Centre
Art historian Marie-Ange Brayer has been Director of Frac Centre (France’s Centre region’s contemporary art collection) in Orléans since 1996. Franc Centre’s collection is primarily devoted to experimental architecture and the relationships between art and architecture. Ms. Brayer is a former fellow of the Académie de France in Rome, Villa Medicis (1994–96). She also co-founded (with Frédéric Migayrou) ArchiLab, and has curated a number of high-profile architectural exhibits (including the French Pavilion at the 8th Venice Biennale with B. Simonot, 2002; and ArchiLab, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, 2004). An art and architecture critic, Ms. Brayer is currently completing her Ph.D. dissertation on the architectural model as an experimental object at EHESS Paris. In 2013 Ms. Brayer co-curated (with Frédéric Migayrou) the 9th ArchiLab exhibit to inaugurate the new Turbulences building at Frac Centre.
Lecture topic
The anti-form: The architectural model caught between computation and representation
The introduction of computer-aided design tools has changed the architectural model’s genetic makeup. However, instead of rendering the architectural model inoperable—or worse, obsolete—this paradigm shift has repositioned the architectural model along the same horizontal line that runs through the design and production processes. Given this new context, architectural models do much more than show us what a future structure will look like, raising the question of whether today’s digital renderings of the physical world have resulted in the creation of new kinds of objects that did not exist previously. The architectural model paradigm has been replaced by a computational object that is revolutionizing the very definition of architecture.